I needed to copy a large amount of files from one USB 3.0 hard drive to another, and didn't want Windows 10 popping up with anything to interrupt the process.

So I made an Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS Desktop DVD, booted off it, started the copy and went to bed. Only around 200 gig or so.

Next morning the copy isn't finished. It's going super crazy slow. Less than 1/4 finished.

So I figure I'll reboot to Windows and disable Defender then sit there and babysit the copy.

Nooooo. Can't read the Seagate ST4000LM016 1N2170-567 4TB destination drive. Plug it in and Windows Explorer wants to hang. I took it out of its case and hooked it up with a USB to SATA cable to see if perhaps the drive's adapter had died. Nope, same problem.

So I launch AOMEI and it takes forever reading K: but finally opens and I see K: (disk 8) is shown as 2TB and there's a disk 9 that's 1.64TB unallocated.

There is no disk 9! It's all supposed to be a single 4TB (3.69TB) drive. What the bleep did Linux do to my drive and how do I un-@#%@ it? Has to be something really whack to make Windows see a single drive as two separate physical drives.

The source drive is connected to the Fresco Logic USB 3.0 controller on the motherboard. The screwed up drive was connected to a Renesas USB 3.0 controller through the built in Genesys hub on a PCIe card. Using the ports that connect directly to the Renesas chip has issues with some 3.0 devices hooking up to its USB 2.0 root hub.

I can't connect anything else to the motherboard's USB 3.0 because some genius at Asrock decided to equip the 770 Extreme 3 with just one USB 3.0 port and no internal header and I don't have a USB 3 hub.

I have an Inateck KTU3FR-5O2I card with a Fresco chip ordered. Some googling reveals that Ubuntu has had issues with super slow (like USB 1.0 slow or worse) transfer speeds with Renesas USB 3.0 controllers for years.

Why Fresco? Because they released new drivers in 2019 for the chip on my motherboard made in 2011! Renesas quit releasing updates for their chips in 2012. The newest available firmware and driver sort of fixed it, now only some devices in the problem ports aren't properly recognized instead of all of them.

You seem to believe the ubuntu livecd had bad support for the usb controller that you plugged the external usb destination drive into. If you are correct in this, I have two ideas which may be useless but could help.

1) Does that 18.0.4 LTS Ubuntu DVD use a very old kernel? If so use a livecd with more current kernel (latest alienbob slackware livecd)?

2) You said you could get the drive out of the case and onto a usb to sata adapter cable to try to eliminate a dead external drive case controller? With the right cable if its out of the case you can plug it into a motherboard sata port which should have no issue.

When you connect the drive to your system (and provided its still working.), linux has several command line tools that can wipe, repartition, and reformat the drive (or the graphical tool gparted might work).

If you need the existing data on the destination drive rescued that could be a complex issue which I do not feel informed enough to address. Perhaps someone else can speak to that.

See what Windows and or linux says about the drive. Use maybe diskpart or gparted or such.

I would assume the latest stable release download from the Ubuntu site would have the latest stable kernel. Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Windows can't say a thing about the drive because it won't show up in Disk Manager. It does show in Explorer but with no info and with it plugged in trying to do anything in Explorer causes it to go not responding. AOMEI Partition assistant can show that writing to the GPT NTFS formatted drive in Ubuntu boogered the partition table so it now appears as a 2TB and a 1.64TB drive. But AOMEI can't touch it either, try any operation and it just hangs.

How about a live Linux ISO that doesn't have so much stuff hidden from the GUI? That Ubuntu image is so bare bones. Not even a hardware info control panel. It would certainly keep gerfingerpokers out of the works.

I've plugged it into my Open Media Vault server, using a USB 2.0 to SATA cable with additional power tap to another USB port.

The single drive is showing as /dev/sdc 016-1N2170 and /dev/sdd 016-1N2170 LUN1

That's not a good thing. It somehow has it misconfigured as a second logical unit number within itself. How could simply having it automatically mount then writing to it with Linux do this to it?

https://askubuntu.com/questions/2570...mposed-maximum
I quickly googled, and Ubuntu 18.04.4 surprises me by using Kernel 5.3 which is fairly new, so admit that I might be barking up the wrong tree there.
You may have an old style msdos disk label on that drive. In that case, if you don't need the data on the drive, you could try to reformat the 4gb destination drive external using a gpt disk label and that might make linux cooperate with it.

This may be too late now but did you examine how the drive appeared in Ubuntu before you started the copy procedure ? Did it appear as a GPT formatted single 4TB drive as it should ? You never mentioned what commands you used to do the copy but cp or rsync would only copy data between filesystems. They would not affect partitions. What commands did you use to do the copying ?

Did you check whether ntfs-3g existed on the Ubuntu Live DVD ? I don't use Windows or Ubuntu but ntfs-3g is part of the basic install of Fedora 30 and is updated periodically.

Was this a 4 TB GPT NTFS drive straight from the factory ?

All I did was boot the DVD then after the drives mounted on the desktop I opened them both then selected the files on the source drive, dragged and dropped to the destination. K'know, what regular folks do with a GUI. No messages of any kind. No warnings like "Are you really sure you want to do this because Linux support for NTFS is *still* a bit sketchy?"

Factory original, un-fooled-around-with Seagate Backup Plus 4TB. 2.5" 15mm thick drive. ST4000LM016

I've done this with other Linux distros before to copy files that Windows wants to put up a fight over because of permissions, but never with a drive over 2TB. So I figured I should get a current distro to ensure it'd work with the large drive.

I've been pointed to http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/ Got that downloaded, just need to see what disused PC I have to hook up nothing but the Seagate drive and a CD-ROM to see if that can fix it.

If it can't I wonder if the Ubuntu people would be interested in examining it to see what their distro did with a simple drag and drop attempt at file copying?

FWIW, many people here will agree with you that Ubuntu is not the most suitable tool for this.
The mentioned SYSRESC_CD might be more suitable both for the copying and the restoring of the drives.

Additionally (without having looked into it) I think it's possible that Windows10 got confused by Linux accessing the drives and is now balking. Have you shut Windows 10 off completely before starting the process? No hibernation or deep sleep or whatever they call it?

So, my strategy would be to salvage the data with Linux, then try to make the drive(s) work again under first Linux, second Windows, then try again with - maybe rsync?

So the copy got corrupted, somewhere overnight. I'd just zap the disk & start the copy again, it'll be quicker than trying to rescue a badly written disk. Probably easier to just use the command line to do it too.

I don't see anything in your posts indicating the filesystem type on the source drive/partition. I'm guessing that you mention choosing not to use windows because you did not trust it to do it successfully that the source was an ntfs filesystem as windows default won't read a Linux filesystem. Is that the case? Since you apparently didn't check the new drive prior to using it would it be possible for you now to do that by using GParted from the UBuntu usb and posting a screenshot of the GParted screen (or fdisk output of the drive). Seems like checking the drive status now and copying again would be simplest.

Not sure what you mean by permission problems in your last post as Linux standard permissions are not understood by windows filesystems so are meaningless.

I should have asked this before but was this drive ever used before ?

If you have never used this drive before it may not have been formatted at all. Raw internal hard drives come from the factory unpartitioned and un-formatted. Only external hard drives in cases usually come formatted with NTFS. When I enter the model number you gave I get the following:

https://www.newegg.ca/seagate-4tb-st...82E16822178870

This is a raw 2.5in laptop drive that would come from the factory unformatted.

When I search for Seagate Backup Plus 4TB I get the following:

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product...E&gclsrc=aw.ds

The page above said that this drive was Compatible with both Windows and Mac without reformatting. As Windows and Mac use different file systems it doesn't mention how the drive was formatted. Since Macs can only read NTFS by default and they can read and write exFAT the drive may be exFAT.

If this drive was unformatted a possible explanation for what happened is as follows. When you tried to copy to an unformatted drive with Ubuntu for some reason it partitioned the drive as MBR which is why only 2TB can be accessed. If it formatted the filesystem as ext3/4 this is why Windows and Windows tools such as AOMEI can't read it. I don't know if Ubuntu would automatically format an unformatted drive on an attempted copy operation so I don't know if this is feasible.

As others have said you need to look at the drive with something like SYSRESC_CD.

Y'all are coming up with all kinds of complications that do not apply. I said in the OP

"I needed to copy a large amount of files from one USB 3.0 hard drive to another"

I have the drive out of its enclosure and connected to another PC, just need to find that round-tuit for time to burn that rescue CD and see if it can fix it.

I was using the drive on Windows. I'd already copied what files were on it to a different drive. I'd done a quick format on it because it's much quicker than deleting the files then emptying the recycle bin. The drive had never been touched by anything other than Windows prior to that fateful meeting.

The source drive contained several innocuous utility programs that Windows Defender (and most other antivirus/malware software) pounces upon with cries of "Evil! Must kill!" and deletes. So Whenever anything changes, or I have to copy them elsewhere, Defender will block copying them (and cease copying all other files in the queue) until I club it over the head and tell it that everything is fine, I really do want to keep that. Some of them are tools to *remove* specific troublesome adware that the AV people steadfastly refuse to recognize as not being the adware they remove. "But it's from the same company as the adware so it's suspect too!"

I have in the past used Linux to copy files from Windows drives because Linux ignores Windows file permissions and the fresh copies become accessible to anyone, hooray.

I did get the copy done, to my *other* Seagate Backup Plus 4TB, with Windows, by temporarily disabling Defender, then having to whitelist *again* everything it insisted had to be eliminated. When will they learn that a Global Exception should mean "No matter where this file exists on this PC or any device connected to it, that means leave it alone! I told you once it's fine, I shouldn't have to tell you again!"

^ This doesn't seem to have anything to do with Linux at all.

It's entirely to do with Linux because Linux has seriously screwed up a hard drive merely by mounting it and attempting to copy files to it.